[QUOTE=tomndebb]
“Throughout the entire world” is a bit misleading. That really boils down to exactly two types of locations: places where blacks were enslaved and treated as second class citizens following the cessation of slavery; places (i.e., Africa), where Colonial powers held on the longest and where those powers explicitly excluded the indigenous peoples from participating in the infrastructure of their own countries until they were “released” from colonialism. This differed from Asia where colonial powers simply imposed their rule over the existing societies and infrastructure and unlike the Americas where the Europeans simply killed off the indigenous population (usually inadvertantly through disease), then intermarried with the survivors, allowing them full access to the same power and education, or held them on reservations where they tend to do as poorly as the African descendants.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it is the case that there are only those two types of locations (enslaved and colonial) where blacks are found. To follow up on this again (my apologies), would you mind commenting on the following?
The point raised earlier by Honesty seemed to suggest that the lack of overall success by blacks in the US was related to conditions specific to the United States:
**(by Honesty) ** “If the scientific answer is “no” then whites will have to acknowledge that slavery, Jim Crow, War on the Drugs, and Katrina are potent factors to explain the why blacks in the United States still, overall, are less successful than their white counterparts.”
Now blacks are distributed throughout the world. (For the sake of convenience, let me use the term to mean populations who describe themselves as black.) I travel a fair amount, and I read a good deal, and it’s my observation that the lack of success of blacks is not specific to the US; their overall success is not even worst in the US. Moreover, I can not think of any location in the entire world where the overall achievement of blacks is at par with other self-described populations.
I accept the racist history of this country but I do not find it sufficient explanation for the current “lack of overall” success of blacks here, and I think it is very divisive to promote that idea. When the oppressive thumb of racism was lifted from sports, for instance, blacks flourished. This has led to yet a new argument: “Well; whites tossed us that bone but they won’t let us have any real success over in this other arena…” And so on.
I am very discouraged by the promotion of arguments which allow only a single explanation: lack of black success is someone else’s fault (and the someone else is usually someone white). Were this true for the US, for example, one would see equal success rates for all groups all over the world, perhaps depending on whether the groups had primacy by population or historic control. One should also see equal success rates of competing immigrant groups. Yet I find few, if any, examples in the entire world where the overall success of blacks is equivalent to the overall success of other groups. I am reluctant, therefore, as a white man, to shoulder the burden of responsibility for this.
It does not seem to matter if blacks are in the majority or minority. It does not seem to matter if they were they first or came as immigrants. It does not seem to matter if the ruling population is white or asian. It does not seem to matter if the political system is socialist or capitalist. I can think of no place in the world where blacks have achieved the same overall success.
We are not going to get past petty daily racism until we stop blaming racism, because it becomes a constant reminder to not look past skin color. I don’t think we’ll get past racism until we stop defining races, period. But where there is an absolute determination to differentiate groups by race or population, those who insist on doing so must accept the consequences if the explanation for the differences is something other than institutional racism and colonialism.
I could not care less if tall people or fat people or myopic people or pigeon-toed people or purple people or brown-eyed people are either smarter or stronger or anything else when averaged as a group. It’s meaningless, and needs to be meaningless. But if myopic people find themselves less successful as a group and start to blame me, I do get to see whether there are factors other than myopia holding back their success.
It would be a better approach, it seems to me, to stop being so determined to categorize (via self-description or public policy) populations by refractive index and look at them as individuals.